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« on: August 24, 2014, 09:09:35 PM »
Hi, this is my first post here.
I am making a roguelike (more of a tech demo that a full-featured game) based on a positional combat system that I will explain below. I am worried that combat in the game will, simply put, be unfun, so I'd like to ask for feedback from those who have more experiece than I do playing roguelikes.
Combat in my game is all melee and all mundane (no magic). I am planning to have a few weapons (sword, spear, axe, flail, halbred, shield) and no armor or any other combat-related items. You attack by moving in four directions (no diagonal movement), and the attack you execute is determined by your previous move as well as your current one. The game also tracks which direction you are facing.
For example, if you move north once, you lunge. If you move west, you sidestep. If you move west again, you turn west and slash with your sword.
Different weapons would have different moves with different attack patterns (25 basic ones per weapon). At the start of the game, only a few move patterns would provide any extra effect other than providing descriptions of your attacks. A forwards lunge would attack the space in front of you. Changing directions then moving backwards would let you spin, damaging all enemies around you. This will hopefully encourage players to fight in the open instead of bashing trolls in a corridor to avoid getting surrounded.
Character progression would come from empowering one's moves instead of gaining experience per kill. At certain points, either between levels, at altars, or after killing special monsters, etc, the player would be offered a choice of three moves to upgrade, and they would choose one. The three upgrades offered would be based on the frequency of moves since the last upgrade, but grinding would not get you better upgrades, it would simply give you a random upgrade for a certain type of move.
Upgrades would empower moves. For example, you may be given the opportunity to upgrade your sidestep so that you get a free move every time you sidestep, although that may be a bit too OP.
The upgrades would be themed based on schools. The school of suchandsuch might favor long, sweeping motions and dramatic sweeps an spins while another may prefer short stabs and jabs that are hard to defend against. Upgrades from the same school will chain well with each other, enabling you to use multiple upgraded moves as a part of a powerful combo.
On the other hand, you might choose to only select the powerful moves from each school, which generally do not share the same movement pattern. Then you would not benefit from combos, but you would have more powerful moves on average.
Overall, the combat system is designed to hopefully promote a more varied style of fighting, moving around and through groups of enemies either in a carefully choreographed dance or in an unplanned rush and watching as your flail smashes everything around you.
Finally, I was thinking of adding a system to penalize repeated behavior, such as lunging at all enemies and never taking damage. Monsters will eventually learn to negate and counter your common moves. As you fight, there may be a monster lurking in the shadows, analyzing your fighting style, and as you turn to engage it in battle, it turns tail and flees down the stairs to train and destroy you if you use the same tactics again.
None of this has actually been implemented yet, by the way. I have an @ walking around a generated level facing in different directions, and one dumb enemy. So feel free to steal this idea and implement it better than me.
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